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Hi everyone,

Many thanks to everyone who participated in the diversity survey which is now closed with 96 responses.

I would like to share some clarification around the survey through the FAQ below, in particular to address some questions we have received. I should have shared this information right from the start, sorry about that. This is a learning process for me, and the ACP Executive Committee and myself are trying our best to improve this process, with the help of your feedback.

Best regards, Andrea Rendl (DEI chair of CP-2022)

Diversity survey FAQ

1. Why did you send out this survey?

The aim is to collect diversity data about our community that will form an initial baseline for further initiatives. It allows us to assess the current state of our conferences and activities regarding diversity. For instance, if we see that x% of our community are female, but on average only y% of invited speakers are female where y << x, we have identified an underrepresentation that we could address. Similarly, we want to evaluate other diversity features such as ethnicity.

The responses to each question will be shared with the ACP Executive Committee, and we will share an analysis of the data with the whole community.

In the upcoming months, we will send out another survey about equity and inclusion, i.e. about how integrated and supported you feel in our research community.

2. Can someone infer my identity from my answers aka how do you store the survey data?

The survey has been closed, and the responses are stored separately for each question, i.e. the sequence of each respondent’s answers has been deleted. This means it is not possible to infer an individual from their answers. Consequently, we will not be able to make an advanced analysis of the data, such as "we have x% professors of which y% undertake care responsibilities", but we believe it is more important to preserve anonymity since we are a fairly small research community. Furthermore, this way we are sure to follow all data protection laws.

We noticed that, when a survey is open, Google Forms stores each sequence of answers individually. This means that it could have been possible to infer somebody's identity from their answers during the survey. I assure the community that only I had access to the data during the collection process and I did not analyse the data. For future surveys we will find another tool that stores the responses separately from the beginning.

3. The question about ethnicity is illegal to ask in France.

After some research and from our understanding, the survey complies with the French law and the GDPR under the condition that the collected data is anonymous, i.e. the identity of a respondent cannot be inferred from the data. Since all responses are stored separated by question, it is not possible to infer the identity of a respondent.

4. I have feedback or suggestions regarding the survey or the DEI initiative.

You can submit (anonymous) feedback about the survey or share suggestions or comments related to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) in CP under this link.

You can also share your email address if you want to allow us to contact you for clarification and/or a follow-up conversation. We are thankful for any kind of feedback.

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